Better off buying 2 680s. I'm certainly interested in what ATI is going to do now with the 7990.

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I don't see how that is. The GTX690 is 2 non gimped GTX680s except for clock speed was dropped a tiny bit one PCB for the same price as 2 GTX680s. Not to mention itll run cooler, its one card rather then 2 so you save space, and with 2 GTX680 your still limited to 2GB fo ram. In sli the ram doesnt add up its only the power, so with the GTX690 the ram actually does add up so you do get the extra 2GB of frame buffer for 4GB. Call me out if im wrong though. That was the case when i ran 2 GTX260s.

WOW! $1k for a GPU. I don't ever recall seeing a card this expensive, I feel sorry for who ever buy's this (if it even becomes available). Typical Nvidia fleecing the market and over charging, this is BAD for end user's as it will only drive the prices up/keep the prices up for every other card. ATi will follow suit I'm sure :shadedshu

This card should be $650/$750 & top spec single GPU should be no more than $375/$400, plus taxxes of course

Dual GPU board should NOT cost double it's single GPU counterpart

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considering your not paying for double the PCB or components on the PCB

I have no idea, but these cards are expensive to make. They kinda have to be. It would be interesting to know how much Nvidia "makes" for each card sold.

And @taxes: 25% here! But seriously taxation is also complex and it's not just "they're stealing our moneysss!!!!1!1!" because that's not how it works. Well Italy is in a bit of trouble because of that thing but if it works I'll gladly pay that 25% "extra".

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They are not, NV and AMD just are greedy bastards that want to squeeze every single penny from us, FYI nvidia planned to sell GK104 at $299 before knowing it could compete with HD 7970.

WOW! $1k for a GPU. I don't ever recall seeing a card this expensive, I feel sorry for who ever buy's this (if it even becomes available). Typical Nvidia fleecing the market and over charging, this is BAD for end user's as it will only drive the prices up/keep the prices up for every other card. ATi will follow suit I'm sure :shadedshu

This card should be $650/$750 & top spec single GPU should be no more than $375/$400, plus taxxes of course

the benchmarks graphs don't look right. They're totally different. Look at Metro 2033 GTX 680 vs GTX 690, and then look at GTX 690 vs GTX 690 SLI. The number for GTX 690s are totally different for the exact same game, exact same resolution and settings.

"Jen-Hsun Huang , president and CEO of NVIDIA, sent his best on a mission. That mission was to build the best dual GK104 video card they could. That mission has been successfully executed and what we have here today is the GeForce GTX 690.
GeForce GTX 690
Can you imagine a video card without any flimsy plastic parts? Now you can because the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 will not be composed of any cheap plastics. A heavy duty dual vapor chamber cooling system relying on heavily nickel plated finstacks will sweat what little heat these GPUs pump out. A cast aluminum frame with trivalent chromium plating gives the card a unique look and tremendous rigidity. An injection molded magnesium fan housing adds to the formidable stiffness of the card. A brand new thixomolding process was used to get the required part precision.
The fan housing is made from injection molded magnesium alloy. Magnesium alloys are used throughout the automotive and aerospace industry (including the engines of the Bugatti Veyron and F-22 Raptor) for their light weight, heat dissipation and acoustic dampening properties - which is the same reason we use it in the GTX 690.
Clear polycarbonate windows that let you peer inside. A center mounted axial fan with optimized fin pitch and air entry angles is a top quality unit used to move cool air through the finstack. While we have not gotten to hear the fan yet, we are told its controller is top notch, which will be underlined by the decibel specs below. A ducted baseplate works with the low profile PCB components. And that is just the cooling system. The GeForce GTX 690 thermal unit cost more than 3X more than NVIDIA has ever spent on thermal system for a retail video card before.
The PCB and its components were not overlooked in the process either. A 10 layer, 2oz. copper PCB is supplied sporting dual 1536 core GK104 "Kepler" silicon all being pushed by a 10 phase "heavy duty" power supply, all in a 300 watt TDP package. If you take a closer look at the PCB you will notice that all usually protruding components have been "shaved" to cut way down on turbulence, allowing better airflow throughout the GTX 690. Also the less turbulence we have, the less noise we have. An on board SLI bridge logic provides independent PCI-e 3.0 x16 access to both GPUs.

Clocks - Noise - RAM

NVIDIA tells us the sound profile of the GeForce GTX 690 will be 36db at idle and a mere 46db under full gaming load.

Base clock on the GeForce GTX 690 is what will be considered "low" by most [H]'ers at just 915MHz Base and 1015MHz Boost, but don't get your panties in a wad just quite yet. Here is the kicker. Being that this is the most expensive and exotic cooling system ever sold by NVIDIA, you think you would expect great overclocking and we are told that you exactly should expect great overclocking. 1300MHz was thrown around more than once while discussing this new GTX 690's overclocks.

Finally this will be the one specification that some will shake their heads at, but from what we have seen in our testing, RAM has not been bottleneck for the most part except in very stressful situations as you can see here in our GTX 680 SLI Review. The GeForce GTX 690 will carry with it 4GB of RAM utilizing a 512-bit GDDR5 infrastructure."

That's actually an interesting read. I kind of agree with the strategy, if you're paying for the best single card solution, why not get increased quality along with top of the line performance? I could never afford such a card, but damn is that thing sexy, and I wish I could...

Forseeable future? There will be 680, 670, 660s and 690s on the shelves. Its not like theres never going to be any more GK104s available.

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And thats why the reviews only come out on the 7th of next month, and availability to follow by as long or longer before they are either sold out of the limited stock, or the price gouging begins.

This is like saying we have the fastest veyron, but you cant have one until the ultr rich have had thwm and moved on to something else, now be hally with just drooling over the specs and flamebaiting with news marks.